(Re)Coding the “Black Quarterback”: A 20-Year Critical Quantitative Analysis of Racial Stacking and the Mediated Dichotomy Between “Pro-Style” and “Dual-Threat”

Abstract

This research applied a critical quantitative approach to the 247sports.com recruiting website to consider whether the “Black quarterback” label systematically rooted in sport persisted as a mediated form of racial stacking for high school football quarterbacks. A 20-year content analysis (2001–2020) examined race, position code, star value, and position ranking for 3448 high school quarterbacks. The results indicated a pattern of racial stacking through the use of coded language, where 85.3% of “pro-style” quarterbacks were White, and Black quarterbacks occupied a majority (55.5%) in the “dual-threat” code. These findings are contextualized through a QuantCrit approach define here or see below where the greatest concern is the cyclical predictability of recruiting rankings that illustrate the centrality and permanence of racism through the constructed duality of two quarterback codes. This research identifies a racialization of ability that establishes “pro-style” as the property of Whiteness and showcases a fundamental relationship between recruiting websites and the discriminatory language drawn on by media, coaches, and others to demarcate quarterbacks by race. This study illuminates how power works through mediated practice that creates an ideological reservoir of racial marking of football players enmeshed in the historical stacking process.